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1.       This film will show you how to search for scientific information in Google Scholar.

2.       In Google Scholar you can find scientific articles, e-books, dissertations, patents and much more from publishers, universities etc. GS is one good place to start when trying to get to know a research area.
Keep in mind though that GS is a complement in your information searching and that you always use GS together with the subject databases available at the library web page. The subject databases allow you to search in a more systematic way and they contain some material not available in GS. Always access GS via the database list on the library webpage. That way you find links to the articles that the university has access to in fulltext and you also find the subject databases in the database list.

3.       There are both advantages and disadvantages in using GS. It is easy to use and open to everybody to search in.

·         One disadvantage is that there is no information about where GS searches. We don’t know what publishers, journals, databaser or webpages a search covers of or how large the coverage is.

·         There may be errors in references.

·         The advanced search is very limited.

·         GS remembers your search history. If you and someone else perform the same search in GS it will give you two different results depending on your previous search history, respectively. The conclusion is that you can’t control how GS searches.

·         It is not known what algorithms GS use to find material.

·         There is no search history that you can use to build new searches of.

4.       Try to find the keywords in your research question and use them in your search. It is important that you use English terms since most of all scientific articles are in English. It is also important to find synonyms to your search terms so far as different researchers often use different terminology for the same phenomenon. You use phrase search when you would like to search a phrase consisting of two words or more. You write the words enclosed in quotation marks and then GS searches the words in the order they are written in.

5.       Choose the three lines at the top left and you will be able to choose Advanced search. There you can decide how to use the search terms and you can search for articles written by a certain author or published in a certain journal.

6.       To the left of the results list you can choose a certain time period when the articles where published and how to sort the list.

7.       You get quite a lot of information in the results list. 

·      Here you find other articles of the same author. 

·      Here are articles that have cited this article and that may lead you to newer research. 

·      Here you find related articles that may have content of interest to you. 

·      If you searched in GS through the library web page all articles that the university has access to in fulltext are displayed and available via the link Find it@HKR. If you find an interesting article and it is not available in full text try doing a Google search. Sometimes articles are available freely and openly on the internet. If you still don’t find it you can order it through the library at a smaller cost. 

·      This creates a reference to the article. Remember to compare the created reference to the reference system you are supposed to use, sometimes there are smaller differences that you need to adjust for.